Dominic Detzen

Associate Professor

Dominic Detzen is an Associate Professor of Accounting at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He earned his Ph.D. from HHL Leipzig Graduate School of Management in 2013 and has since developed a diverse research portfolio, with a strong focus on the societal role of the audit profession. His work also explores accounting regulation, standard setting, and accounting history.

This paper draws on interviews with audit professionals in the Netherlands to investigate the decision-making processes involved in assessing and reporting on audit clients’ ability to continue as a going concern. Using Actor-Network-Theory, we conceptualize these decisions as a dynamic process, involving four interrelated stages. First, partners must recognize going concern as a critical issue of the audit (problematization). Second, they enlist a variety of internal and external actors to inform the assessment (interessement). Third, these actors are coordinated and monitored in the audit team’s preliminary evaluation (enrollment). Fourth, in consultation with national office, partners complete the going concern evaluation, including audit opinion wording and approval of financial statement disclosures (mobilization). By offering an in-depth process account of auditors’ going concern decisions, our study challenges prevailing portrayals in the literature as primarily individual or mechanistic. It also offers new insights and suggestions for future research into auditor going concern decisions.
This practice note provides initial insights from an interview study that investigates audit professionals’ decision-making processes regarding their clients’ ability to continue as a going concern. The authors find that these decisions involve the activation of a range of different actors that the engagement leader needs to manage and coordinate. Specifically, auditors need to recognize going  concern as a relevant issue (Phase 1). They then need to negotiate the involvement of their firm’s national office and restructuring specialists (Phase 2). As they conduct the going concern assessment, they mobilize a range of internal and external actors to negotiate management disclosures and the inclusion (or not) of a going concern paragraph in their audit opinion (Phase 3).
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